An enraged Sarah Palin created a stir after revealing she had been duped for Sacha Baron Cohen’s "Who Is America?" but despite the media frenzy, the segment was cut from the show. In an interview to be aired on "The Last Laugh" podcast, Cohen has now revealed why the sit-down interview with the former vice-presidential candidate was not aired and it has nothing to do with being threatened. The reason it was cut is Palin was just not funny enough.
"Just like her candidacy for vice president, she wasn’t good enough to make the show," Cohen told The Daily Beast.
Shortly after the interview last year, Palin admitted she had been "duped" in an angry Facebook post.
"I join a long list of American public personalities who have fallen victim to the evil, exploitive, sick "humor" of the British 'comedian' Sacha Baron Cohen, enabled and sponsored by CBS/Showtime," she wrote. "Here is my challenge, shallow Sacha boy: go ahead — air the footage. Experience tells us it will be heavily edited, not pretty, and intended to humiliate," she added.
The post went viral and when "Who Is America?" did finally air, thousands tuned in to see the highly publicized interview. The joke was apparently on Palin though.
"She was literally promoting a show that she was not in," Cohen told The Daily Beast. "And I had this dilemma, which was I didn’t want to reveal that she wasn’t in the show and yet part of me wanted to correct her, because she was spreading some misinformation, which I know is quite a popular thing to do now."
Cohen admitted there was pressure from Showtime to include the much-talked-about segment but he insisted it was not funny enough to make the cut.
"For the pieces to be good, there has to be a good comic dynamic," Cohen previously told Deadline. "She was just delivering these kind of rote answers, as if she was doing a campaign speech. And even though I sat with her I think for about two-and-a-half hours, there was no comedy gold."
So maybe Palin did get the last laugh after all.
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